


time does not change us (it just unfolds us)

by wave_of_sorrow



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Episode Related, F/M, Gen, M/M, Temporary Character Death - Jack Harkness, Time Travel, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-05 20:35:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/410752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wave_of_sorrow/pseuds/wave_of_sorrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jack Harkness dies, and River Song makes sure he always meets the Doctor on time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	time does not change us (it just unfolds us)

**Author's Note:**

> It all started when I recently watched Boom Town and realised that there had to be two Captain Jacks in Cardiff at the same time. Then River Song showed up and wouldn't leave and everyone had sex and askgsfs. Title is a Max Frisch quote.
> 
> ETA (02.02.2013): Thinking back on this fic I feel like it's probably a bit confusing at times unless you're somewhat OCD about dates in DW/Torchwood and/or spent hours and hours consulting the [TARDIS data core](http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_Wiki) like I did when I wrote this. So I thought I'd try to make a few things that are only vaguely alluded to in the story a bit more obvious/clearer. (I know it's probably a bit late for this now, but better late than never eh? If there's anything you'd like to ask about please feel free!)
> 
> Notes at the end will hopefully shed some light on the timey-wimey aspects of this story that, in retrospect, may not make massive amounts of sense without a lot of background information.

_Out of life’s school of war: what does not destroy me makes me stronger._  
Friedrich Nietzsche

In the year 200,100 Jack Harkness dies for the first time. Funnily enough, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as that first, gasping breath he takes when he comes to life again. _(Years and years later he jokes about it, how not one of the deaths he’s died was as painful as life, and it doesn’t make anybody laugh.)_

He doesn’t fully realize it yet; that he was dead and now isn’t. It’s an impossible thing, and so he rationalizes it away with _I must have been knocked out_ s and half-remembered proverbs about gift horses and their mouths. _(This is a point in time when he still remembers all the little things Rose Tyler told him in the kitchen of the TARDIS with their hands curled around chipped mugs of too sweet tea.)_

Having established that he’s alive and well, he simply goes along with it _(This is what Jack does.)_ and then confirms three suspicions in very quick succession: the Daleks have been turned to dust _(one)_ , the TARDIS is back on the Game Station _(two)_ , the TARDIS is leaving the Game Station _(three)_.

He’s just in time to see her disappear. _(This is what it feels like when your big brother lets go of your hand.)_

He doesn’t waste much time waiting for the Doctor to come back for him _(What’s a day or four when you’ve got all of eternity? He sometimes wonders if it makes a difference: that in 200,100 he doesn’t know that yet.)_ and uses his wrist strap to take him to early twenty-first century Earth. When he ends up in the late nineteenth with a burnt out Vortex manipulator and no way to leave, he figures that it’s the right planet at least and only a matter of time before the Doctor and Rose find him. _(It’s always just a matter of time.)_

When they don’t, he simply goes along with that, too. _(This is what Jack does.)_

~*~

“Doctor!”

He has a feeling he’d recognize that leather jacket anywhere; being in 1870 Cardiff just makes it a whole lot easier. It’s been less than a year since he last saw it and its owner, and the grin that spreads across Jack’s face is neither suggestive nor particularly refined. Mostly, it just screams of pure, fucking relief. _(This is when Jack still thinks in terms of months and weeks and days, and hours still have the capacity to feel like lifetimes.)_

“That’s me!” the Doctor says. Jack’s across the room and about to hug the living daylights out of the Doctor, not caring one bit about the time’s taboos because _he is out of here,_ when a simple question stops him with the toes of his boots bumping the Doctor’s and their faces far too close. “And who are you?”

_(This is the night Jack Harkness learns that time travel is a bitch.)_

The Doctor is smiling, and it’s the same goofy smile he’s always smiled, and this is the first time he smiles it at Jack. _(There are things Jack will wonder about all the years of his impossibly long life, and this is one of them: did the Doctor always first meet him in 1870?)_

Jack steps back, swallows hard, and can’t quite screw his best smile into place. “I… No, I just… I’m sorry,” he says, and his throat constricts and there’s nothing he can do about the way he chokes on the words a little. “I thought you were someone I knew, my mistake.”

Two lines form between the Doctor’s eyebrows; worry or confusion, or maybe both, Jack can’t quite tell.

The urge to tell the Doctor he just hasn’t met Jack yet, and hug him anyway, and trust him to make it alright is overwhelming. _(If there’s one thing Jack always believes in it’s this: the Doctor can fix things, and make people better.)_ He knows he should just walk away from this, and pretend it’s just a mistake, and hope the Doctor forgets his face, and he doesn’t think he can do it.

_(It’ll be another few hundred years before Jack masters the art of pretending their timelines are in synch. A few million more and they’ll both have changed so much and so often that they’ll fail to recognize each other more often than not.)_

“Hello, sweetie,” she says, links arms with Jack and starts pulling him away before she’s even finished speaking, and he lets her, and this is how he doesn’t mess up.

For a few moments all that really registers with Jack is her curly hair, and the warm scent of her perfume, and how her impeccable dress fails to fully conceal that she’s completely out of her time.

“You’re not from around here, are you,” he says, and her fingers tighten and dig into his arm like she’s afraid he’ll make a run for it. _(She should know better: this is Jack Harkness and she is beautiful.)_

“Takes one to know one, Captain.”

She sits them down at a table in the opposite end of the pub, and when she’s ordered drinks and still hasn’t properly acknowledged him, Jack says, “I don’t mean to be rude, but who the hell are you?”

“Doctor River Song,” she says, and her grin is full of things he doesn’t understand yet.

“A Doctor, huh,” Jack says, tries to smile, and pretends not to notice the glass she’s nudging towards him across the tabletop. “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Doctor River Song, but.”

“Oh, the pleasure’s all mine,” she purrs over the rim of her own glass. “The infamous Captain Jack Harkness at last.” She pauses, breathing deeply like she’s savouring the scent of this moment, and with a vague wave of one gloved hand to indicate the place the Doctor no longer occupies, she says, “He’s told me all about you. Or, well, he will have. I’ve been dying to meet you.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jack asks, and they share twin smiles full of empty promises across the table. “But that’s not why you’re here. So, why are you here?”

“Because he told me to be, of course,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the universe. _(This is what the Doctor’s friends do: as they’re told.)_

“And he couldn’t have come himself,” Jack says, and it’s deliberately not intoned as a question.

“He couldn’t risk crossing his own timeline,” River tells him, and her curls throw faint shadows across her skin where they frame her face. In the low light her eyes are the colour of absinthe.

“What did he send you here to do?” he asks, and the way she grins at him confirms what he’s known since the moment she pulled him away from the Doctor. “So, you’re here to make sure we don’t meet.”

“I’m here to preserve the timelines,” she says, and her hand twitches like it wants to reach out and squeeze his. _(In a few decades she’ll tell him it was her fault he didn’t get to see Charles Dickens on Christmas Eve.)_

“And what’s keeping me from getting up and going after him?” Jack asks, defiant and angry and trying to hide it behind artificial smiles.

River shrugs, and says, “Why don’t you have a drink first?”

Jack laughs, quietly and just once, and he’s still smiling at her when he says, “I don’t think so.” He’s been on her end of this game often enough to know exactly how it’s played, and he doesn’t plan on giving her the satisfaction of being easy. _(In 2007 he buys Gwen Cooper a drink, and this is when he learns how.)_

An answering grin spreads across her face, slow and wicked, and she says, “Can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?”

She offers him her own glass, her lipstick smudged red across the rim, and he grins back at her with too many teeth. He pushes her glass back at her and downs his own drink, and winks at her when he sees her incredulous expression.

_(He’ll never tell her that he didn’t actually know she didn’t put anything in it.)_

“I know _he_ ’ll see me again,” Jack says with a nod as vague as the wave of her hand, “but what about me? Will I ever see him again?”

“Oh, yes,” River says, “and no.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means yes, and no.” The thick notebook she pulls out of her impossibly small handbag is TARDIS blue. _(It’s bigger on the inside.)_ “I’ll see you soon, Captain,” she says, and gets up. He tries to get a glimpse, but the notebook’s already disappeared again.

“How soon?” he asks, and when he makes to stand with her she pushes him back down into his chair.

“Sooner than him,” she says with a smile that isn’t quite sad.

He has a feeling he won’t get an answer, but he just has to ask: “Who are you, River Song?”

_(This is the first time either of them has this conversation.)_

“Shh, spoilers,” she whispers with her finger pressed against her pursed lips, and winks at him like it’s just an inside joke he doesn’t understand yet.

~*~

In 1892 Jack Harkness dies for the second time. His first breath is a gasp _(His first breath is always a gasp.)_ and he instinctively feels the spot where he remembers the bullet hitting him, and finds nothing.

“That’s a bit strange,” he says to no one in particular and licks his dry lips. There’s a taste of iron at the back of his throat and he wonders if he’s going to be sick.

“What’s that?” she asks, and he turns his head to find River sitting cross-legged on the cold ground.

He struggles to sit up, his head swimming and vision slipping in and out of focus as he confirms that they’re somewhere near the docks. He takes a few deep breaths of early morning air and watches them leave him in frosted little clouds. Then he tells her, “For a second there I thought I remembered dying.”

River meets his eyes when she says, “You did.”

_(This is the day Jack Harkness learns what it means to be the exception to the only rule that matters.)_

Jack tries to laugh it off _(This is what Jack does.)_ , but his grin slides away when River just keeps looking at him. “I died,” he says, and the words feel strange in his mouth.

“You died,” River confirms. Her face is still blank, but she’s watching him carefully.

“You’re telling me I was dead,” he says, and when she nods goes on, “and now I’m not.”

“Obviously,” she says with half a smile. She’s wearing jeans from the twenty-first century and boots from a galaxy she shouldn’t have been able to visit, and she looks tired.

“That’s impossible,” Jack says over the sounds of a city slowly waking up.

“Oh yes, quite so,” she says, and then smirks. “But don’t tell me I’m the first to call you impossible, Captain.”

Jack tries, and fails, to laugh. “So what?” he asks, and there’s a sour taste in his mouth, “I can’t die? Not ever?”

“Everything has its time and everything dies,” River says, and he knows the words are not her own.

“Even me?”

She leans forward and lowers her voice like she’s telling him a secret, “Spoilers.” River’s grin is slow and meaningful, and with a wink that fails to be careless she says, “Don’t worry, you’ve got time.” _(The way she says it makes it sound like it’s Time, with a capital T.)_

“Is that why he didn’t come back for me?” Jack asks, and she knows it only comes out so harsh because it hurts so much. “I’ve got all the time in the universe, so why bother? Is that it?”

“It’s difficult to look at you,” River says, “for one of his kind.” _(That’s all she ever tells him, and by the time he thinks he understands he knows better than to ask.)_ “But I think mostly he just couldn’t bear to take her back to see what she’d done.”

“Rose,” Jack says, and it comes out soft and quivering. “And what was it that she did?” he asks, because he’s spent decades just taking everything in stride and always wondering, never understanding.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t,” River says, and she sounds it too.

“Spoilers?” Jack guesses, and the grin he offers her is the bitter, bastard half-sibling of his usual smile.

“Spoilers,” she confirms, and smiles that private smile again, like this is a secret shared between them. 

River checks her watch, and it has far too many hands and they’re turning the wrong way. She doesn’t need to say that it’s time for her to go.

“Tell me, River Song,” Jack says when she’s uncurled her legs and gotten up, “if I hadn’t talked to you just now, would I have met the Doctor a few decades early again?”

He can’t see her expression with the brand new sun backlighting her. “No,” she says, and he’s surprised.

“Then why are you here?” he asks, and her hair is a frizzy halo around her head.

“Because he’s not,” River says, and pushes a button on her watch. She flickers and flares, and then she’s gone.

~*~

In 1941 he knows her by the smell of her perfume, all heat and spice and cutting through the cold winter air. Her heels click against the cobblestones and he slows down to let her catch up. _(He knows her by her gait by now, by the burnt metal scent that lingers in her hair, and that she never shows up without reason.)_

“I’m not going to do something stupid like get on a train to London to watch myself meet him, you know,” Jack says when she links arms with him.

“Oh, I know,” River says, and rests her head on his shoulder. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why are you here?” he asks, and stops walking to turn around and look her in the eye.

_(They’ve had this conversation often enough for it to lose most of its meaning.)_

“Because this is January the twentieth, 1941,” she says, laces her fingers through his and pulls him back the way he came.

“And that’s a special day?” Jack asks, and the way she grins at him says it all. _(Spoilers.)_

“Tell you what,” he says, and yanks them back around, “I’ll take you dancing at the Ritz. You haven’t danced until you’ve danced in this decade.”

_(This is the night Jack Harkness learns not to trust River Song.)_

“I was afraid you’d say that,” River sighs, “and I’m sorry, but I really haven’t got time to do this the nice way,” she says, and stops, and kisses him.

Her lips are soft, the kiss hard and efficient with their noses bumping uncomfortably, and her lipstick tastes like bitter almonds.

_(This is the first time they do this.)_

“What did you,” Jack chokes, and falls to his knees, clutching at her skirts.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” River says, and he thinks she really sounds it, “but you know what they say, what doesn’t kill you…”

He’s dead before she’s finished speaking, and when he comes back to life again she’s gone and it’s January the twenty-first. Jack lies back on the filthy ground of the alley she dumped him in and laughs until his sides hurt and he can’t breathe. Then he gets up and moves on. _(This is what Jack does.)_

~*~

It’s 2006, and the Hub is going into emergency lockdown. It isn’t a problem per se, because this is the day the Doctor _(in his ninth incarnation)_ takes Jack Harkness _(when he’s still mortal)_ and Rose Tyler _(before it all goes wrong)_ to Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS, and Jack’s been wondering how to avoid himself and keep the team from interfering with the timelines. It’s just that he’s not the one who triggered the lockdown, and there’s really only one thing that can mean.

“Hello, soldier,” River says, and she doesn’t seem fazed by the three guns being pointed at her, but she raises her hands in feigned surrender anyway.

“How did you get in here without triggering the alarms?” Jack asks, and her grin is wide and knowing. “And you can put your guns down,” he tells the others, and they do: Toshiko first, then Owen, and lastly and reluctantly Suzie.

“So, this is Torchwood 3 then?” River muses, twirling on the spot to get a good look around. “I’ve read the reports, but this is really something.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Jack says, and crosses his arms.

She rolls her eyes and pokes him in the chest, and says, “You gave me the security codes.” Jack frowns, and River’s face takes on a pinched kind of expression _(He doesn’t make the connection in 2006, because it’s still too early in his timeline, but a few years later he sees the same expression on an unfamiliar Doctor’s face. It always reminds him of River, instead of the other way round.)_ and she stretches the next word almost obscenely, “ _Well_ , I say you _gave_ them to me, but… you will, anyway.” Jack’s frown deepens, and she continues, “ _Well_ , you’ll give them to him and he’ll give them, gave them, will have given them, to me.”

She offers him a guilty smile and an apologetic shrug, and Jack asks, “How does that even work?”

River scoffs and waves a dismissive hand, and says, “Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.” She makes a face, and mumbles, “God, I’ve been around this one too much.”

“Wibbly _what_?”

“Ah, bugger,” River says, and starts rifling through the blue book she never seems to go anywhere without. “Not there yet, then. Sorry, I try, but it’s hard to keep track when you keep jumping back and forth in time.” Jack tries to peek _(Jack always tries to peek.)_ , but she slaps his hand away and holds the book so close to her chest that all he can see is where it smushes her breasts. “Alright, so when is this for you?” she glances up to study Jack’s face, and then back down to flip a couple of pages. “Early days, so I assume so far it’s only been leather jacket and jumpers for you. Am I right?”

Jack opens his mouth to reply, but Owen interrupts, “Judging from this little reunion scene I assume you know who she is?”

Jack looks at River, and doesn’t say anything, because there’s only ever one answer to that question. _(No.)_ “Professor River Song,” she says, and drops a mock curtsey. It looks strange in her leather trousers and mud-spattered boots.

“ _Professor_ Song? Last time I saw you it was still Doctor,” Jack says, and she shrugs like she wants to say it’s been a while. “What else did I miss?”

“Spoilers,” River says with a grin, and then rubs her hands together briskly. “Now, I understand that emergency lockdown lasts twenty-four hours and I’m simply _starving._ You wouldn’t happen to have anything to eat around here?”

“Jack?” This comes from Tosh, and it’s said in the voice she uses when she needs him to tell her it’s okay. _(Thousands of years in the future he still remembers the way she says his name at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a little fragment of memory tucked away in the attic of his heart in a box labelled Toshiko Sato.)_

“It’s okay, Tosh,” he says, and doesn’t take his eyes off River. “The emergency lockdown lasts twenty-four hours and can’t be disabled, so we’ll just have to sit tight until it’s over. We’re going to be fine, trust me. Just don’t let her kiss you.”

River throws her head back and laughs, and it’s low and dirty. “I tried to kill him,” she says in reply to the unvoiced question hanging in the room. “He’s never quite forgiven me for it.”

_(By now River has killed him often enough that Jack isn’t quite sure which time she’s talking about.)_

“Well, you can’t have tried very hard,” Suzie says, and returns to her workstation, and Jack and River share grins like it’s an inside joke. _(Spoilers.)_

When the twenty-four hours are over Jack watches her enter coordinates into a wrist strap not unlike his own, and with the wind off the bay whipping her hair around her face River says, “See you soon, Captain,” and sounds sorry, and then she’s gone.

_(The next time he sees her it’s November, and Jack’s standing next to his daughter as her mother is buried.)_

~*~

It’s springtime in 2008, and Jack Harkness returns from the longest year that never was, and Cardiff is nothing like what he remembers. The memories he’s clung to all those days on the Valiant turn out to have been distorted and bent out of shape by absence and longing, and the reality of this city is in comparison bland and boring and painfully ordinary. _(Cardiff in this exact moment of time is the most beautiful thing Jack ever sees.)_

River says, “I always wondered why you don’t go with him.”

Jack stops, hands in his coat pockets, and tilts his head back to feel the weak March sun warm his face. “I guess it just didn’t feel right,” he says, and then looks at River to give her a humourless smile. “Funny that. There was a time when I would have dropped everything the second he offered to take me with him.”

River shrugs, leans back against the railing on the Plass, and says, “People change, and so do priorities.”

“Guess we all gotta grow up at some point, eh?” he jokes, and it sounds sad and raw, and River steps forward to cup his face in her hands.

 _(Rule seventeen.)_ “The Doctor always comes back for those he loves,” she says, and watches Jack’s throat contract visibly as he swallows down what he might have said.

_(And in Room 456 in a hotel, full of bad dreams and twisting corridors, that is a prison: the Doctor, leaving.)_

Jack turns his head at the sound of the TARDIS dematerializing, and when it’s faded he asks, “Does he know you’re here?”

River shakes her head, and it makes her hair bounce, and she says, “Not this one, no. The Doctor you just said goodbye to hasn’t met me yet.”

“How does that work, anyway?” he asks, and her hands smooth down the sides of his neck to rest on his shoulders.

“The Doctor and I are living into opposite directions on the same timeline,” River says, and watches her own fingers toy with the lapels of Jack’s coat. “Every time we meet I know him more, and he knows me less. It’s like he’s forgetting me.”

“How much has he forgotten by now?” Jack asks, and when she looks up at him her smile is brave, and Jack wraps his arms around her.

In broad daylight in the middle of Cardiff they kiss like they’ll never do it again. _(They kiss like they’ve not done it in a very long time.)_

They rent a room, and tremors race through Jack’s hands as he cups her bare breasts in them, and River pulls him into the cradle of her spread legs and pushes his hips forward with the heels of her feet to guide him inside of her.

She whispers encouragement in his ear as he thrusts and gasps erratically, and when he buries his face in her neck and begins to shake she holds his hand until he bites down and comes, shuddering. She silences any apologies he might have offered with a kiss that is so gentle it hurts, and he slides down on the bed until she feels his breath hot and damp on the inside of her thigh.

He slips two fingers into her, works them until he hits the right spot and she twitches and moans, and then he tongues her until she arches off the mattress with her fingers twisted in his hair and the slick salt taste of her orgasm in his mouth.

When he looks up at River she’s covering her face with her forearm, and she’s shaking, and he holds her hand until he realizes she’s laughing. _(This is not something River Song usually gets: a first time that isn’t a last time.)_ She shoves him onto his back, climbs on top and rubs herself all over him until he’s hard again, and she rides him until her face is red and sweaty and she’s growling low in her throat. Jack wedges a hand between them and flicks his thumb over her clit until she screams and convulses in his arms, then he flips her over and fucks her until she’s biting the pillow.

_(If there’s one thing Jack always knows how to do it’s this: sex.)_

“Why tell me any of it now?” Jack asks afterwards, when she’s sprawled out on the bed and he’s curled up against her side with his head pillowed on her soft belly.

River shifts a bit, and pets his hair, and says, “Because now you know what it’s like to meet a Doctor who isn’t _your_ Doctor.”

 _(A million years in the future, and it’s still this: a worn leather jacket, a Northern accent, ridiculous ears, and fantastic.)_ Jack smiles into her skin, and murmurs, “You never forget your first Doctor.”

“No, you don’t,” River agrees, and a wistful smile tugs at the corners of her mouth.

“When did you first meet him?” Jack asks, and slides his fingers through the sticky curls between her legs until she swats him away.

“Depends on your point of view,” River says, and scratches behind one of Jack’s ears. “In the fifty-second century, and in 1969, and in 2011, and in 1938.”

Jack hums, and pushes into her hand, and then says, “No, I meant, when did you first meet him on his timeline?”

“I know what you meant,” she says, and he can hear the infuriating grin in her voice, “and I also know that you know that I can’t tell you.”

“Alright,” he sighs, and bites her hipbone, “but at least tell me this: do I ever get to shag him again?”

_(Somewhere between 1941 and 200,100 Jack Harkness has his face buried between Rose Tyler’s quivering thighs while the Doctor moves inside of him, slow and deliberate.)_

River’s nails dig into his neck, quick and scolding, and she singsongs, “Spoilers.”

Then her watch beeps from somewhere near the floor, and she unceremoniously shoves him off to dig through their clothes to find it, and Jack sits back against the headboard and enjoys the view.

“Ah, yes,” River says when she looks at it, then pads back over to the bed and sits on Jack’s thighs. She grabs his arm, and punches something into his wrist strap, and he takes the opportunity to bury his face between her breasts and breathe her in. “These are the coordinates for where you need to go. There’s a blowfish on cocaine that needs to be taken care of.”

“One for the road, then?” Jack asks, and slides his palms over her arse in favour of reacting to the blowfish thing. _(This is what Jack does.)_

“I’m afraid it’s time to go,” River says, and the press of her lips against his is quick and soft, and then she disappears into the bathroom.

Jack leaves before she’s finished showering, and wonders when he’ll see her again.

~*~

It’s night, and the Hub is empty except for Jack, and the TARDIS materializes right in the middle of the main floor. The year is 2009, and since Jack last saw the Doctor people turned into walking fat and the skies ignited. _(This is shortly after Toshiko Sato and Owen Harper die, and Torchwood 3 is still an open wound.)_

“Hello, Jack,” the Doctor says, lingers on the a and sharpens the ck to obscene levels, and then picks his way through the papers his appearance stirred up and littered across the floor.

“Ianto’s going to kill me,” Jack says, eyeing the mess, and watches the Doctor prod a few artefacts left lying around.

“Who’s Ianto?” he asks, and picks up a charred piece of alien metal and licks it. _(This is the Doctor Jack never truly becomes familiar with: suit and trainers, gravity-defying hair and restless hands, an overactive mouth and an obsessive-compulsive bitch of an oral fixation.)_

“Do you have to do that?” Jack asks, and pulls a face that mimics the Doctor’s grimace at the taste.

“Sorry, bad habit,” the Doctor says, and shoves his hands into his pockets. “Anyway, not why I’m here.”

A filthy grin tugs at the corner of Jack’s mouth, and he says, “What, you’re not here to put things in your mouth? And here I was, getting my hopes up.”

The Doctor gives him a stern look, and says, “Stop it,” and Jack’s grin only widens.

“So, why are you here, Doc?” he asks, and tries to ignore that it’s Tosh’s old workstation the Doctor’s leaning back on.

He shrugs, and tugs at his earlobe, and says, “I was just in the fifty-first century, made me think of you, thought I’d pop in and see how you’re doing.”

 _(Rule one.)_ “You’re such a liar,” Jack chuckles, and the Doctor smiles guiltily.

“Yeah,” he admits a little ruefully, and scratches the back of his neck, “I am.” _(This is a point late enough on Jack’s personal timeline that he no longer blames the Doctor for sometimes being human.)_

“Want a drink?” Jack asks, and the Doctor’s grin is wide and excited.

“That’s right,” he says, bouncing on the balls of his feet a little, “You never did get me that drink. Have you got any tea?”

Jack laughs, and can’t stop himself from tilting the Doctor’s chin up to brush a kiss across his lips. _(This is when he kisses this particular Doctor for the first time.)_ “Anything you want,” he murmurs, and grins when the Doctor blushes and squirms.

In Jack’s office with their hands wrapped around cups of tea the Doctor says, “I met a woman called River Song today.” _(This is the night Jack Harkness learns how to pretend his timeline is in synch with the Doctor’s.)_

“Was she hot?” he asks, and sips his tea. _(This is what Jack does.)_

The Doctor gives him another stern look, and then rubs a hand over his face. “She was someone from my future, Jack,” he says, and slumps back in his chair.

“So?” Jack asks, confused by the Doctor’s unhappy frown.

“She died,” the Doctor says, and Jack sets his cup down more forcefully than he intended. “The first time I ever met her was the day she died. I don’t know how that’s even possible.”

Jack clears his throat, and asks, “Is that why you came here?”

The Doctor shrugs, and pulls a face, and then jumps up to pace Jack’s office. “No,” he says, “Yes. Not really. I don’t know.” He runs his hands through his hair until it sticks up even more, and he gives a frustrated growl before saying, “You’re from the fifty-first century, Jack. I thought you might know who she is. She told me she was an archaeologist.”

_(River Song presses her finger against her pursed lips, and whispers, “Spoilers.”)_

“Sorry, Doc,” Jack says, and offers him an apologetic smile, “Never heard of her.”

The Doctor kicks the carpet in frustration, and Jack gets up to knead his tense shoulders until he sighs and slumps forward into Jack’s arms. The first kiss is placed on the Doctor’s temple, and he squirms a bit. The second is on his jaw, and it gets Jack a hum. The third is on the corner of his mouth, and the Doctor tilts his head so Jack can properly kiss him.

They spend more time snogging than Jack ever remembers doing with his previous Doctor, and it’s a little too eager to be skilled, but the appreciative noises this Doctor is making more than make up for it.

When Jack drops to his knees and takes the Doctor’s cock into his mouth it gets him a yelp and a buck of the hips, and wiggling the tip of his tongue into the slit makes the Doctor grab Jack’s head with both hands. The blowjob is wet and sloppy, and Jack watches the Doctor watch him for most of it, and he has to hold the Doctor’s hips in place to keep him from pulling out as he comes.

If Jack is surprised when the Doctor lets him fuck him bent over the desk with his head pillowed on his forearms he doesn’t show it, and just goes along with it. _(This is what Jack does.)_

“I don’t remember that being so nice,” the Doctor muses when Jack’s finished and collapsed on top of him with a grunt. Then he elbows Jack in the ribs, and says, “I also don’t remember you being so heavy.”

Jack laughs and moves off the Doctor, giving his bum and affectionate swat and tossing the condom in the bin. “Well, you wouldn’t,” he says as they both refasten their trousers. “The old you didn’t like getting fucked nearly as much as this one does.”

The Doctor flushes, and Jack’s grin turns wolfish. “I should,” the Doctor gestures vaguely, “go. I should really go.”

Jack cups his face, and slips his tongue between the Doctor’s teeth, and says against his mouth, “Feel free to drop by again sometime.”

_(And this is when he kisses this particular Doctor for the last time.)_

~*~

In a bar in a rundown spaceport in the forty-fifth century River Song buys Jack Harkness a drink. _(For Jack this is just a few months after the Doctor, suit and trainers, gave him a note in a different bar.)_

“There’s something I need you to do,” she says, and she’s at once younger and older than Jack has ever seen her.

If he’s surprised that she’s here he’s not showing it. He asks, “What’s that?” _(This is what Jack does.)_

“Find the Doctor,” River says, and hands Jack a slip of paper with a set of coordinates, “and make sure he gets to this place before April the twenty-second, 2011.”

“What’s so special about April the twenty-second, 2011?” he asks, and he doesn’t think he can do this.

“That’s the day the Doctor dies,” River says, and Jack stops with his glass halfway to his mouth. “I’m sorry,” she says, like she’s somehow responsible.

“And why would I want to help him?” Jack asks, and it’s bitter and hurt. _(This is a time when Jack wants to hate the Doctor, and he never really gets the hang of it.)_

River’s face softens, and she says, “Because he’s the Doctor, and you’re his friend, and this is what the Doctor’s friends do.” _(As they’re told.)_

Somehow, that’s the end of that.

“Why me, though?” Jack asks when River gets up. “Why can’t you do it?”

Her smile is pained, and she leans in to kiss him, and speaks into his mouth, “Spoilers.”

She leaves, and Jack watches her go; six hundred years in the future she’ll die, and it’s already happened. _(“Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey,” River says, and in his mind she winks.)_

~*~

On Earth, in 2011, in front of a house with a TARDIS blue door, Jack says, “Nice bowtie.”

The Doctor beams, and Jack’s answering grin is born entirely out of habit, and when he holds out his hand to this new Doctor he’s gathered into a tight embrace instead. _(And at the end of the universe: the Doctor and the Captain, sharing grins and embracing.)_

“Hello,” Amy says, looking at Jack and clearly liking what she sees.

“Don’t start,” the Doctor tells her, and disentangles himself from Jack’s arms.

“What, I can’t even say hello?” she asks, and crosses her arms. “He’s not complaining, is he,” she says with a nod at Jack who grins at her.

“You’ve been holding out on me, Doc,” he says with one arm still wrapped around the Doctor’s shoulders, surveying this latest set of companions. “Who’s the pretty one?”

“Uh, that’s my wife,” Rory says, and steps a little closer to Amy.

Jack leers, and says, “Good to know, but I wasn’t talking about her.” He winks, and holds out his hand, “Captain Jack Harkness, by the way.”

“Oh, stop it,” the Doctor says as Rory chokes and blushes, and it sounds much fonder than it used to.

_(And in the mind of Rory Williams the memory of two thousand years that never were, and all the times he kissed Jack Harkness pressed up against the Pandorica.)_

“Doctor,” Amy says slowly, and eyes Jack speculatively, “is that, like, your boyfriend or something?”

“Or something,” the Doctor says quickly, and Jack laughs. “Now, if you two don’t mind, we’ll be off.”

“What’s the rush?” Jack asks as the Doctor tries to steer him towards the TARDIS.

“Yeah, what’s the rush?” Amy asks, and Jack grins at her.

“Both of you, stop it,” the Doctor says, pointing an accusing finger at Jack and Amy in turn, and they both raise their hands in a gesture of surrender with the same unconvincingly innocent expression. The Doctor looks horrified. “Dear God, I always knew the two of you meeting would be extremely bad, but this is,” he gestures between the two of them, and they raise their eyebrows.

_(Amelia Pond and Jack Harkness, spending half their lives waiting for the Doctor, and they never know that about each other.)_

“Rory, take your wife and go,” the Doctor says, and then turns to poke Jack in the chest. “Jack, you’re coming with me.”

“Wait, does that mean I’m your wife?” Jack asks even as he’s shoved into the TARDIS, and Amy’s laughter follows them into the Vortex.

~*~

It’s been almost fifty years since the house with the blue door, and in the wardrobe room of the TARDIS Jack finds a rainbow coloured scarf. _(In a little box somewhere in the attic of Jack’s heart: the scent of her skin embedded in dyed wool, and the label reads Rose Tyler.)_

“She left all of her things,” the Doctor says, trailing his fingers over the clothes of people long gone. _(Pink hoodie, worn leather jacket, plain white t-shirt, pinstripe suit.)_ “Sometimes I’ll find a jacket, or a hair band, or a tube of her mascara.” He takes the scarf from Jack’s hands, and breathes it in, and closes his eyes. 

“Remember that one time she had to break us out of prison?” Jack asks, and a grin tugs at the corner of his mouth.

“Remember that one time we had to break _her_ out of prison?” the Doctor asks, and they both laugh at the memory.

_(The happiest time in the long life of Captain Jack Harkness is this: the Doctor and Rose Tyler, in the TARDIS, and all of time and space.)_

“Did I lie to her?” the Doctor asks when their laughter’s died down a bit, and it wipes the smile off Jack’s face and makes his brow knit in confusion.

“What?”

“Amy, did I lie to her?” the Doctor asks, and takes a small step closer to Jack to better look him in the eye. “When she asked whether you were my boyfriend and I said you weren’t, did I lie to her?”

“I don’t know,” Jack says, and the Doctor’s still holding the scarf. “Did you?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I was asking you,” the Doctor admits, and scratches his head, and it’s such a childishly nervous gesture that Jack takes his hands into his own. He moves into his personal space, and tilts his head, and he can feel the Doctor’s breath quick and shallow against his mouth.

“I should warn you that I’ve not had much practice in this body,” the Doctor says, and his voice squeaks a little.

Jack grins _(This is the Doctor Jack knows best: bowtie and tweed, skittish and excitable, and old and very, very kind.)_ , and kisses him.

It’s soft and gentle, and Jack cups the Doctor’s face as he deepens the kiss and slides his tongue into the warmth of his mouth, and it smells like Rose Tyler and Cardiff and 2006.

~*~

“Honey, I’m home,” the Doctor calls, and Jack emerges from under the console, wiping his hands on a dirty rag. _(This is the last time the Doctor saw River Song before she killed him.)_

Jack crosses the room in quick strides and kisses him, and his thumbs leave dark smudges on the Doctor’s jaw. “Hi,” he says, and then steals a few more kisses.

The Doctor’s eyes narrow suspiciously as they break apart, and he asks, “Have you been doing unspeakable things to my ship again?”

Jack huffs out a laugh against the Doctor’s mouth, and kisses the side of his neck, and says, “Possibly.” He bites the Doctor’s chin, and strokes a hand over the control panels. “You know I can’t help myself around beautiful ladies.”

“Stop,” the Doctor says, and peels Jack’s hand off the controls, “flirting with my ship, Captain.”

Jack grins, and gives the Doctor a mock salute. “Yes, sir,” he says, and makes it sound positively filthy.

The Doctor closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath, and then says, “How was your day?” 

_(Two hundred years of time and space, give or take a few decades, and their life is mad and exciting, and excruciatingly domestic.)_

Lying in Jack’s bed with the Doctor curled up against his side and half on top of him, Jack says, “Hey, Doc?” He gets a sleepy hum and a tightening of the arm across his chest in response, and he rubs the Doctor’s back as he asks, “Did you ever think about going back to save her? Or warn her, at least?”

“Of course I’ve thought about it,” the Doctor says, and Jack can hear the frown in his voice.

“And?” he prompts, and the Doctor squirms a little until Jack resumes his back rubbing.

He’s silent for a while, and then he says, “When I first met River Song she told me that the last time she saw me I took her to Darillium to see the Singing Towers. For her it had already happened.”

“So?” Jack asks, and the Doctor rubs his cheek against his chest. “Time can be rewritten.”

“Not those times, not one line,” the Doctor says, and Jack knows the words are not his own.

_(Two hundred years of time and space, and in all that time Jack manages to avoid running into River Song, and stored away in the inside pocket of his coat there’s a slip of paper with a set coordinates and a list of dates.)_

“Do you ever miss it?” the Doctor asks after a while, and props his chin up on Jack’s chest to look at him.

“Miss what?” Jack asks, and makes a futile attempt to brush the Doctor’s tousled hair out of his eyes until his hand’s swatted away. _(This is the oldest Doctor Jack knows at this point in his life, and it is also the youngest.)_

“Being with the old me,” the Doctor says, “well, _mes_.”

Jack rolls them over and kisses him until they’re both hard and panting and thoroughly distracted, because there’s only ever one answer to that question. _(Yes.)_ It’s frantic and uncoordinated in a way it normally isn’t, and the Doctor’s knees would leave bruises on Jack’s ribs if he wasn’t Jack. When the Doctor comes it’s with his head turned to the side and his mouth pressed against his own shoulder, and Jack strokes him through it until the legs around his torso loosen.

“Come on,” the Doctor murmurs with a roll of the hips, and Jack’s mouth falls open. “That’s it,” the Doctor enthuses as Jack groans and goes faster, and he’d laugh at the delighted look on the Doctor’s face if he wasn’t so fucking close.

Jack comes with a strangled gasp into the Doctor’s mouth and a firm hand wrapped around the back of his neck, and when he’s caught his breath a bit he rolls off the Doctor so he can rest his head on Jack’s shoulder and snuggle into his side.

_(The Doctor, leather jacket and jumpers, spoons Jack and Jack spoons Rose. The Doctor, suit and trainers, never shares a bed with Jack. The Doctor, bowtie and tweed, has a minimum of one arm and one leg wrapped around Jack as soon as they’re horizontal.)_

~*~

In the control room of the TARDIS, a long, long time after the house with the blue door, Jack takes a slip of paper with a set of coordinates out of his coat pocket.

“How about,” the Doctor says, and pushes a few buttons, “the Alignment of Exodor? Seventeen galaxies in perfect unison, Jack!”

The Doctor beams at him, and Jack says, “I think it’s time for me to go, Doc.”

The Doctor’s face freezes, and then softens, and he says, “Of course.” _(Two hundred years of time and space, and every second of it goodbye.)_ “Where do you want to go?”

“How about you drop me off in early 2011,” Jack says, and brushes his fingers over the Doctor’s throat under the pretence of straightening his bowtie, “and then you can investigate the weird power fluctuations in Colchester. I hear Craig Owens lives there now.”

The Doctor narrows his eyes at Jack, and asks, “How do you know Craig?”

Jack chuckles and kisses him, and then says, “It was my job to keep tabs on you, remember?”

“How could I forget?” the Doctor says, and rolls his eyes. “Colchester it is, then. Much more interesting than _seventeen galaxies in perfect unison_.”

Jack crosses his arms when the Doctor tries to stare him down, and eventually he sighs and sets the coordinates for England, Earth, 2011.

In the light of a flickering streetlamp the Doctor murmurs, “Look at you, Captain Jack Harkness.” The smiles they share are sad, and then they’re embracing, and the Doctor breathes in the scent of Jack’s coat.

When they pull apart their eyes are damp, and they start laughing at the same moment. “We’re going soft in our old age,” Jack says, and the Doctor shoves him away.

“Oh, go on then,” he says, and his smile ruins the effect of shooing Jack away. “Off you go.”

Jack gives him a sloppy salute, and says, “See you in another few hundred years, Doc.”

_(In the fifty-second century River Song reads the eyewitness accounts of three children from 2011, and they are signed by Captain Jack Harkness.)_

~*~

In a bar, somewhere in the second half of the twenty-third century River Song says, “Thank you.”

“I thought you’d forgotten me,” Jack jokes, and orders her a drink. “It’s been a while.”

“Well, it’s only been,” she checks her watch, “twelve days for me.”

“I didn’t tell him to send you back to 1870,” Jack says, “but from the looks of it he still did it.”

River smiles, and says, “No, he didn’t.” Jack frowns, and she admits, “He never did.”

“But when we first met you said he’d sent you back to keep the timelines intact.”

She leans in and beckons him to do the same like she wants to tell him a secret, and into the space between their faces she says, “I lied.” Her chuckle is low and delighted, and Jack’s grin is slow and bewildered.

_(This is the night Jack Harkness learns that he could always trust River Song.)_

“But if the Doctor didn’t tell you, then why were you there?” Jack asks.

River’s face tightens, and then softens, and she says, “Because he wasn’t,” like she wishes he already knew that.

Jack takes her hand in his, and kisses her knuckles, because he doesn’t know what to say.

“There’s something else I lied about,” she says, and Jack can see her throat contract as she swallows.

“The Doctor isn’t dead, I know,” he says, and she has a warp star on a chain wrapped around her neck.

River blinks at him in surprise, and asks, “How did you know?”

Jack leans in, and whispers into her ear, “Spoilers.” _(It is once Jack’s job to keep tabs on the Doctor, and he never stops doing it.)_

River throws her head back and laughs, and then she says, “Oh, you are impossible, Jack.”

Jack winks, and orders them more drinks, and eventually he says, “I know you’ve seen him again, but will I ever see him again?”

She smiles at him over the rim of her glass. “Yes,” she says, “and no.”

It’s Jack’s turn to laugh, and then he says, “So, go on. Tell me about your latest adventure with him. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him.”

River’s smile turns nostalgic, and she says, “It’s been a while for me too. The last time I saw him he took me to Darillium to see the Singing Towers. It was beautiful, but he was sad. I don’t know why.”

_(This is the night Jack Harkness learns what it is to be River Song.)_

Jack swallows hard, and River frowns at him and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Jack says. _(In London, in 1941 he has a fully equipped Chula warship.)_ He doesn’t for one second think River believes him.

Later he fucks her out the back, up against the wall with one of her legs braced against an overflowing trashcan and the cold drizzle dampening their clothes and skin. She comes first, with her fingernails digging into his arse and her eyes wide open. When Jack follows her he buries his face in her neck, and it smells like River and rain and the spice of her perfume.

She pushes him off her, pulls her knickers back up and straightens her skirt, and says, “It’s always you and the Doctor, in the end. No matter how often or how much you change you always find your way back to each other, right across all of time and space.”

Her smile is tight and sad, and Jack asks, “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know,” River says, and then kisses him on the lips. “Goodbye, Captain. Until the next time.”

_(There is no next time, and this is when he last sees her: somewhere in the second half of the twenty-third century, walking away and into the rain.)_

~*~

_(And billions of years in the future, when he hasn’t been Captain Jack Harkness in a long time, tucked away somewhere in the attic of his heart: boxes, filled with memory and gathering dust._

_Rose Tyler, and her tongue curls around her teeth, and tea in the kitchen of the TARDIS, and the sound she makes when the Doctor hits her g-spot._

_Martha Jones, and chips in an abandoned warehouse, and butterflies down her right arm, and she kisses him in front of the Millennium Centre._

_Toshiko Sato, and shy smiles when he calls her brilliant, and the line of her neck when her hair’s tied up, and she smells like lavender._

_Owen Harper, and they never talk of their dead wives, and boxes of cold pizza in the quiet dark of the Hub, and vomiting up beer in a prison cell._

_Ianto Jones, and perfect coffee and immaculate suits, and the way he groans when he’s deep-throated, and a second toothbrush on his bathroom sink._

_Gwen Cooper, and the stubborn set her of jaw, and freckles down the bridge of her nose, and dancing at a wedding that is hers and not his._

_The Doctor, and always all of time and space, and fantastic, and hugging because Rose Tyler is alive._

_River Song, and spoilers.)_

**Author's Note:**

> As promised, an attempt to make things clearer, though I do suggest consulting the TARDIS data core on the finer points of the timelines.
> 
> 1) The Ninth Doctor (pre-Rose) being in Cardiff in 1870 is an invention entirely of my own, as is Jack's missing out on seeing Charles Dickens on Christmas Eve 1869 (The Unquiet Dead).
> 
> 2) January 20th 1941 is the day a mortal Jack Harkness first meets the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler in London (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances) while an immortal Jack Harkness from 2008 gets transported back in time with Toshiko Sato to meet the real Jack Harkness at the Ritz in Cardiff (Captain Jack Harkness) while yet another immortal Jack Harkness (the one who'd lived linearly from 1869 to 1941) was also wandering around Cardiff. (We don't have _actual_ proof of where the latter Jack was at that time, but I think it's safe to assume he was in Cardiff as he was working for Torchwood already.) [On a sidenote, which may or may not be of interest to you, when the Jack Harkness in this story comes back to life on January 21st the real Captain Jack Harkness has died in combat.]
> 
> 3) The Hub going into lockdown in 2006 is my attempt to explain why Torchwood didn't intervene during the events of Boom Town.
> 
> 4) The first times River Song meets the Doctor (depending on your point of view) are: on Demon's Run as baby Melody Pond on top of revealing who she really is as the adult River Song (fifty-second century; A Good Man Goes To War), as the little girl in the astronaut suit (1969; The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon), as Mels (2011; Let's Kill Hitler) and as the newly regenerated Mels/Melody who will become the River Song we know (1938; Let's Kill Hitler).
> 
> 5) The "drink" Jack gets the Tenth Doctor here is a reference to the conversation he had with the Ninth Doctor in Boom Town ("Buy me a drink first!").
> 
> 6) When the Eleventh Doctor drops Jack off in 2011 it's timed so that they can move straight on to Closing Time and Miracle Day, respectively.
> 
> I think those are the main points where it got a little timey-wimey and/or vague, so hopefully that has cleared up some of the possible confusion. Again, questions are more than welcome. <3


End file.
